"The bigger the lie, the more they believe."

A follower of Marx, Guy Debord, also discusses commodity fetishism and takes another focus on the degradation of mass media and marketing in The Society of the Spectacle. His statment that

The loss of quality is so evident at all levels of spectacular language, of the objects it praises and the behavior it regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative. It is the quantitative which the reality form develops, and it can only develop within the quantitative.

actually led me to ponder the 5th season of The Wire most critically. In it, the focus is directed towards the daily ins and outs of the newsroom at The Baltimore Sun newspaper. As the season progresses, valuable and thoughtful reporters are lost due to budget cuts, the question of what makes a story "newsworthy" is consistently pondered, and the thirst for profit seems to ultimately cast a gloomy scenario on all forms of media in the future. The season, according to David Simon, grapples with "what stories get told and what don't and why it is that things stay the same."

The newspaper itself is, of course, a commodity and is therefore subject to all of the domination and reification delivered to all commodity by the people. There are important stories going on all around the city of Baltimore that the newspaper simply does not have the manpower to cover OR the important stories are deemed not "newsworthy" by higher ups at the paper because they aren't sensational enough and therefore won't make enough money. Ultimately, a fake news story of a homeless killer purported by a wayward detective in order to gain more money for his unit becomes the star story. Through these faked murders, however, everyone (readers, detectives, writers) become interested in an actual legitimate problem in their city--the homeless and their mistreatment by the government. Sadly, it took a sensationalized and false murder mystery to garner that kind of attention.

According to Wikipedia, "When Debord says that, 'All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,' he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction." It is the figurative image of a ruthless killer of the homeless that brings up the concrete discussion of who is the actual killer of the homeless--the ignorance shown to this group of people by the government and voters alike. The newspaper and its readers are "at once present at absent" (Debord) as they ignore the real problems of the city and focus their attention instead on sensationlized and fictionalized media saturation. Just like the drug trade, the writers and workers of the newspaper all ultimately fall victim to commodity fetishization as they become commodities themselves.

"Until then, we're going to handle this like businessmen, sell the shit, make the profit and later for that gangsta bullshit."

To begin to discuss themes, ideas, and storylines as Marxist on The Wire could be an entire blog in and of itself. The intricacies of the drug trade, the commodification and reification of nearly everything and every person on the show, as well as the inherent problems within every system presented would make for a long entry. In order to try and "decipher the heiroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products" (Marx 91), I will defer to "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" by Karl Marx in order to attempt to flesh out the relationships of the dealers to the suppliers, the buyers to the dealers, and those who work for the dealers.

The drug trade on The Wire functions as a hierarchy. The suppliers who arrange the shipments of the drugs are essentially nameless ("The Greek") and few are even allowed to speak to them. Joseph "Prop Joe" Stewart worked with these people and secured large imports of heroin for those like Stringer Bell and Marlo Stanfield (both also kingpins). The chain goes further and further down--the furthest point probably being the "hoppers," the extremely young kids working for the kingpins who are generally lookouts.

Within the hierarchy, these people have no relationship to one another except to further fetishize their product and the production of that product. Their actions are completely related to the fluctuation of the market and each and every player in that game eventually betrays someone in some way in order to get ahead of the other, seek revenge for loss of goods (whether that "good" be an actual person, money, or drugs), or to adhere to a "code" established through the trade itself.

As Marx states:

In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values... A man or a community is rich, a pearl of a diamond is valuable... A pearl or a diamond is valuable' as a pearl or a diamond. So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange- value in either a pearl or a diamond.... What confirms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man...

In the case of The Wire, this quote can be applied to the drug trade and those implicit in it. No chemist has ever applied a direct value on the heroin or crack-cocaine the kingpins are dealing. The value of all of it is directly applied through the consumers themselves. No one is exempt from both the fetishism of commodities and becoming the commodities themselves.

"Look, the pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out the game early. "

D' Angelo Barksdale is a primary character on The Wire. He is the lieutenant of the drug trade organization run by his uncle, Avon Barksdale, and Stringer Bell. Throughout the show, D'Angelo proves time and time again to deeply feel the polarizing effects of what, to him, is essentially "right" from "wrong."

As he watches dealers get beaten for minor infractions and is unwittingly involved in a murder, he pulls farther away from his family and the "game" itself. He is a high-ranking drug dealer with a conscience--something that doesn't generally bode well for anyone.

Eventually, D'Angelo is caught running a large amount of drugs into Baltimore and is sent to prison. Before he enters, however, he learns that his protege and friend, Wallace, has been killed by order of his uncle. This act immediately pulls the family further apart and, as D'Angelo enters prison, he feels the desire to cut ties with his family.

While in prison, D'Angelo is introduced to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and discusses it with his fellow inmates. I suggest viewing the video here.

As, Barksdale analyzes Fitzgerald's renowned novel (which was generally ignored at time of publishing...), he observes the parallels between his life and Gatsby's. D'Angelo was at the top of his game. He had money, family, a girlfriend, a son--but all of these things were meaningless to him since he earned them through a broken and damaged system. Like Gatsby, the wealth he acquired didn't negate the person he was before the money, nor did it negate the lengths they had to go through to get it. Although The Great Gatsby is sometimes viewed as an American Dream success story (individual wealth, success, etc), both Gatsby and D'Angelo prove to represent the haunting truth of that dream. Despite appearances, neither can escape who they truly are.

I believe that Adorno would say that Barksdale was only able to reach these conclusions by being necessarily excluded by the cultural majority, and therefore industry, by being imprisoned.

For some insight:

According to Wikipedia: Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who argued...that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardised cultural goods – through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.

By those terms, Barksdale was only able to find true sense of self and insight by being faced with his most basic needs. To say that his imprisonment set him (mentally) free may sound trite, but it is true. Through the escape of his false needs perpetuated by the culture industry, D'Angelo was able to seek a different kind of freedom--freedom from the prison of his occupation and familial expectations. Neither Gatsby's nor Barksdale's stories are without tragedy. They themselves are tragic characters, unable to escape their pasts to build new futures. Through Barksdale's imprisonment, however, he is able to observe and understand more deeply the inner workings of that which actually imprisons him and, ultimately, this understanding gives him the strength to cut his familial ties and give up the drug trade.